Displaying every Unicode character takes 33 minutes

There are some videos that appear on the web that make you think “why?”. But at the same time you have to commend the people who create them for first thinking up the idea, then following through with it.

The video above is one such example. Joerg Pringer of netpoetic.com decided he wanted to make a video showing every single Unicode character with one displaying per frame. That’s a total of 49,571 characters.

At first the idea seemed quite simple, and included using Adobe After Effects to piece it together. But as is usually the case, problems come up, and in Joerg’s case he started writing his own program as no single existing piece of software at his disposal seemed to fit the bill. The end result was a little app that saved each character as a PNG file and then used ffmpeg to piece it together as a video.

One final problem was finding and fixing all the undefined characters. Those are the characters your system cannot display and instead show up as an undefined box. Again, a custom program was planned, but in the end he just edited them out in a text editor as it was quicker.

You can view all the characters rendered in the video as a long list, which gives you some idea of just how big a character set this is. The fact the video is 33 minutes and 17 seconds long is also a good indication of the diverse character sets Unicode encompasses.